Review of Pleco app: Read Chinese text immediately!

[halfthishalfthat]

Intensely awesome app. But I was hoping for more Chinese !!!

[ForgottenRomantic]

"But the big problem that the learners have if they are going to a restaurant or something they have to read all of the Chinese..." *Points at a japanese sign* :P

Although japanese is not so different in that aspect either...

[needmanshini]

Should you succeed, you should try Japanese next. With traditional Taiwanese characters, you can quickly amass a quick level of literacy in Japanese too. Plus your a native English speaker so katakana isn't hard either. You would still to have to learn how to do multiple readings with the Japanese style Chinese characters though along with learning hiragana and katakana and maybe some special Chinese characters which pertain just to Japanese .

[flashatizer]

How did you get your pleco to be in Chinese Chinese?

[irishpolyglot]

@flashatizer There are several dictionaries you can download and one of them is Chinese-Chinese. You'll get more details on Pleco's site. This wasn't intentional on my part, as such a dictionary is not useful to me in my current elementary level.

[Plutarkthefirst]

hey cool review! thanks for that, I'm learning Mandarin at the moment, and was looking for something like that. It's so annoying that everytime you tell people you learn chinese, the first they say is that it's impossible! lazy gits

[wakold]

Man that's an awesome app! Thanks for the video Benny. However, to me this looks like a really great way to become very quickly character-lazy, and let all the phone app do the work for you! If one wants to memorize characters rather quickly, I'd say you would need the diligence to quickly give up this app and work through the hard way.

[Ifan8430]

Benny, I want to thank you for encouraging people to try to speak the language. Although reading and listening a lot has drastically improved my Chinese abilities, I would have never started this journey if I hadn't had a friend that encouraged me to try and show me that I could say a few words. This video reminded me of when I was in Taiwan, couldn't read anything and really knew what it like to be illiterate. Terrible feeling. Really limited my experience there as I was alone and had no help.

[ToxinMortalis]

This is possible the coolest APP I have seen. Now, if they had one for Japanese I would swoon. That I will buy in a heartbeat.

Thanks for the video!

[g1981c]

just because i am an ass i will point out that OCR stands for Optical, rather than Optimal character recognition ...

[ZeeJeff]

@g1981c You're not an ass, I was just about to point that out. OPTICAL character recognition!!!

[irishpolyglot]

@g1981c No matter what language I make a video in, I'll always get corrections...

I challenge people to try and make a 20 minute video without a stumble or slip up :) If you don't have a script it's hard! I do it in English just as much as in studied languages.

[tmp011007]

@irishpolyglot stop being that sensitive dude. are you "american" or something? :P.. btw, nice review

[Mixarenan]

@g1981c So why is it all in caps like a regular initialism?

[twilightfan1268]

@g1981c The speech in this video is spontaneous so it's a lot harder not to make mistakes (especially in long videos like this). You can tell that it is not scripted because of the hesitations :)

[jdonnarumma1]

Does it work for Japanese also ?

[borderlord]

Who's your new friend holding the camera :)

[irishpolyglot]

@borderlord I am meeting new people this week, but none of them would really be so good in holding the camera the way I wanted (harder than it looks), so I got the guy who found my apartment for me to help out instead.

[studiodreamken]

@irishpolyglot If you ever need a travel companion/camera man let me know! :)

[Jate0000]

The paid handwritten recognition is awesome, you can write so fast and the AI always get it right.

[irishpolyglot]

@Jate0000 In Android downloads it is free until June (according to pleco.com).

[JLemien]

@Jate0000 iCED Chinese Dictionary has the same kind of hand written recognition, and for free. I think that it is fairly common nowadays, because even three or four years ago it was standard in electronic dictionaries.

[aspeggy]

Great video, very informative. :D What do you think of memrise.com for learning traditional characters? I've only used it a little so far as mandarin isn't my main target language but some of the mnemonics are pretty funny ^.^

[irishpolyglot]

@aspeggy Memrise's base version is only for simplified Chinese. They have a community driven traditional one, which is very useful, but not quite as cool!

Glad you liked the video!